Knowledge Base

WD: Conditional MERGEFIELD Lost When Converted to MacWord

Article ID: 165635

Article Last Modified on 8/17/2005

Microsoft Word 6.0 Standard Edition
Microsoft Word 6.0a
Microsoft Word 6.0c
Microsoft Word 95 Standard Edition
Microsoft Word 95a

This article was previously published under Q165635

SYMPTOMS

When you save a mail merge main document containing conditional MERGEFIELD statements as a Word for the Macintosh 4.0 or 5.x document, the information in the conditional MERGEFIELD statement is lost.

WORKAROUND

Re-create the conditional MERGEFIELD statement after you open the mail merge main document in Word.

NOTE: You may need to reattach the data document when you open the mail merge main document.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

The conversion process does not correctly handle the conditional MERGEFIELD statement. For example, if the statement in Word for Windows is

{IF {MERGEFIELD LastName}="Jones" "yes" "no"}

the same statement after opening the converted document in Word for the Macintosh 5.1 would appear as:

<<IF=>><<ENDIF>>

When you reopen the converted document back into Word, the conditional MERGEFIELD statement shows as:

Word 7.0, Word 97

{IF= "" ""}

Word 6.0

{ MERGEFIELD LastName }=Jonesyesno

Additional query words: conditional print constructs field 8.0 8.00

Keywords: kbbug kbinterop kbmerge kbfield KB165635